Compartment No 6 by Rosa Liksom

her and Mitka’s secret place. Someone had painted a black cat on the wall of the ground-floor entrance and the stairwells were completely covered in quotes from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. How many times had she and Mitka walked up those narrow wooden stairs in the dark of night? Two steps were broken on the sixth floor, and if you didn’t know about it you could fall straight to your death. But they knew about it, and they knew to be careful. On the highest landing, amid the stench of cat piss, was where she and Mitka had smoked their first joint together.
    Her travelling companion bashfully changed his underwear. He wrapped the dirty items in an old copy of Literaturnaya Gazeta and put the bundle in his suitcase.
    The passengers who had boarded at Omsk were standing in the corridor. Among them was a Red Army officer and his old, translucently thin housekeeper. His uniform coat fitted him well and his shoes shone, as did his bloated face. He stood in the passageway with his back straight, periodically clearing his throat in a dignified manner. The man stared at him from the door of the compartment.
    â€˜The Soviet Union didn’t have any officers in Lenin’s day, just soldiers and commanders. You could only tell the difference between them up close, by the emblems on their collars. Those days are long behind us. Nowadays the lieutenants and captains sit together at one table and the majors and colonels at another. That grimacing mug has a thief’s look about him. He’s probably a pansy, eating away at the spine of the Soviet Union.’
    The officer’s ears turned red and he took several stiff strides to stand in front of the man, then grabbed him by the nose and squeezed so hard that the man slumped back to his bunk and sat down.
    â€˜Hooligans will be thrown off the train at the next station,’ the officer roared. ‘If you were a little younger, I’d send you to the devil’s kitchen for some re-education.’
    The man was taken off guard, surprised by the officer’s swiftness. ‘I didn’t …’ he said, then he jumped up and threw a punch, but the officer dodged it and his fist struck the doorframe.
    He spat angrily over his left shoulder into the corridor and hissed. The officer looked at him, sighed deeply, and left. Arisa came rushing into the corridor with the axe in her hand.
    â€˜Pig! We don’t spit on everything here! I’ll wring you out till you piss your pants, Comrade Cast Iron Hero.’
    She swung the axe so that the girl had to duck, then disappeared. The man watched her go with a look of relief.
    The corridor emptied. The girl stood alone for a moment, then went back into the compartment. The man was sitting on the edge of his bed, still furious.
    She didn’t dare move. He calmed down little by little, burying his chin in a large hand and sighing.
    â€˜I can’t stand looking at roosters like that guy. Dressed up like a whore for the Party. Guys like that are the reason we still haven’t beaten the Afghans. A pansy like that is worse than those fairy Afghan fighters. I’ve seen on the news how those mussulmans handle their guns out in the desert. They carry them like babies. And what do our Red Army officers do? They take their cue from that bunch of throwbacks and go around wiggling their arses. If guys like me were running the war the way it should be run, we would’ve beaten those phoney kings in the first attack. But no, they’ve got to fag it up. When I was in the army, the gays got a pole up their arse. A real soldier knows what to do with a weapon. You shoot the enemy. Not between the eyes – in the gut.’
    The girl had only one thought: she hated him.
    They passed crumbling houses gobbled up by their gardens, villages eaten by forest, cities swallowed by the mossy taiga. The train sped east, dark brown clouds covering the sky, when suddenly in the south a little crack of the